Jill Litt, PhD
Professor, Environmental Health, CU Boulder • Affiliate Faculty, Renée Crown Wellness Institute

Dr. Litt is a Professor of Environmental Health in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an Associated Researcher at the Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal). Dr. Litt received her PhD in environmental health and public policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has experience in the area of urban environmental health working over the past decade in the neighborhoods of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and Denver and more recently, Barcelona, Spain and Marseille and Montpellier, France at the nexus of nature-based solutions (e.g., community gardens and parks), built environment, and health and mental well-being in cities. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Dr. Litt utilizes the methods of community-based participatory research, epidemiology, risk assessment, and ethnography to study the relationships between residential environments and health and specifically the ways in which neighborhoods influence health behaviors, physical health, and mental well-being and how social and psychological processes (e.g., neighborhood attachment, environmental aesthetics, collective efficacy) affect these relationships. In 2018, she received funding from the European Union, through its Horizons 2020 initiative, to conduct a 4-country analysis of social, emotional and environmental factors that influence people’s aesthetic ratings of place. This project is entitled Researching Environments that Magnify Health Everyday (REMEDHY). Dr. Litt is leading a randomized controlled clinical trial of community gardening and its impact on health behaviors and mental health as risk factors for cancer among low income and minority families in Denver, Colorado (2017-2020), which is funded by the American Cancer Society through Research Scholar Award from the Health Equity program. Dr. Litt is honored to be a part of the Crown Institute research portfolio, launching a study of nature-based social prescribing to address loneliness among pregnant and parenting adolescents in Denver, Colorado.